CHECKING DARWIN

Monday, February 25, 2008

New research led by Queen’s University, in association with a number of international researchers, is shedding fresh light on Charles Darwin’s paradigm-shifting theory of evolution. The research, performed by Queen’s biology professor Vicki L. Friesen and PhD student Andrea Smith, among others, demonstrates for the first time that sympatric speciation could occur through allochronic isolation, or separation by breeding times.Darwin first outlined his theory of sympatric speciation in his 1859 book The Origin of Species. The theory states that species within a single geographic area can evolve from the same parent species but be distinct from each other. At the time, Darwin was unable to prove his theory. Instead, it was thought that a geographic barrier, such as an ocean, glacier or mountain, was necessary for the evolution of separate species. This competing theory is called allopatric speciation. However, Friesen, Smith and their researchers have re-examined Darwin’s 150-year-old evolutionary enigma. They have found new details that cast doubt on allopatric speciation as being the sole method of evolution.“While that model fits for many parts of the natural world,” Friesen said, “it doesn’t explain why some species appear to have evolved separately within the same location, where there are no geographic barriers to gene flow.”
The storm petrel’s mating habits support Darwin’s long-unproven theory of sympatric speciation. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia
According to the study, a seabird called the band-rumped storm petrel will share nests. One group of birds will live in the nest and then leave, only to be replaced by other birds. As seasons change the birds come and go, always returning for the same season. The birds are, however, genetically different. Since the birds have not cross-season mated in several thousand years, the genetic differences were able to develop without a geographic barrier. The differences highlight the possibility of evolution in one location.The petrels are not the only species to follow this pattern. They are, however, the first confirmed example of a bird to do so. Fish such as salmon have long been known to share spawning grounds.For Friesen, the research sheds new light on biodiversity and biology in general. The importance to Darwin’s original writings is not lost on her either.“It’s also exciting to be able to verify Darwin’s original theory,” she said. Being a part of history is more than most scientists can hope for.An odd side-development is that the European Union has elevated the conservation status of the petrels in light of the new research. Why the bird was less worthy of being saved before is unknown.

Darwin's Failed Predictions, Slide 12: "The origin of life remains a mystery" (from JudgingPBS.com)
[Editor's Note: This is slide 12 in a series of 14 slides available at JudgingPBS.com, a new website featuring "Darwin's Failed Predictions," a response to PBS-NOVA's online materials for their "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial" documentary.]
If, as Slide 11 suggests, human origins are a mystery to Darwinian scientists, the chemical origin of life presents a far greater challenge. As Gregg Easterbrook recently wrote in Wired Magazine, “What creates life out of the inanimate compounds that make up living things? No one knows. How were the first organisms assembled? Nature hasn't given us the slightest hint. If anything, the mystery has deepened over time.”1
Origin of life theorists have struggled simply to account for the origin of pre-biological organic chemicals on the early earth, with little success. So drastic is the evidence against pre-biotic synthesis, that in 1990 the Space Studies Board of the National Research Council recommended that origin of life scientists undertake a "reexamination of biological monomer synthesis under primitive Earthlike environments, as revealed in current models of the early Earth."2 But this is only the beginning of the problem, as leading origin of life theorist Stanley Miller once admitted that “making compounds and making life are two different things.”3
When trying to “make” the first life-form, scientists cannot rely upon Darwinian processes. Darwinian evolution requires replication, and prior to the origin of life there was no replication. Origin of life theorist Arthur Shapiro explains that an explanation for the first self-replicating molecule “has not yet been described in detail or demonstrated” but “is taken for granted in the philosophy of dialectical materialism.”4
Accounting for the origin of a self-replicating molecule would still not explain how modern cells arose. Our DNA code requires an irreducibly complex system requiring the information in DNA, the enzymes that assist DNA’s replication and protection, a protective cell membrane, and a complex system of machinery used to transcribe and translate language of DNA into protein. Faced with the complexity of this system, biologist Frank Salisbury lamented in 1971 that “the entire system must come into being as one unit, or it is worthless. There may well be ways out of this dilemma, but I don't see them at the moment.”5
In 1995, leading biologists John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary explained that accounting for the origin of this system remains “perhaps the most perplexing problem in evolutionary biology” because “the existing translational machinery is at the same time so complex, so universal and so essential that it is hard to see how it could have come into existence or how life could have existed without it.”6
Scientists may one day create life in the lab. But they will have done so using intelligent design. The theory that life could have originated via blind natural chemical processes relying upon sheer dumb luck remains unexplained.
References Cited:1. Gregg Easterbrook, “Where did life come from?,” Wired Magazine, page 108 (February, 2007).2. National Research Council Space Studies Board, The Search for Life's Origins (National Academy Press: Washington D.C., 1990).3. Statements made by Stanley Miller at a talk given by him for a UCSD Origins of Life seminar class on January 19, 1999.4. Robert Shapiro, Origins: A Skeptics Guide to the Creation of Life on Earth, page 207 (Summit Books, 1986).5. Frank B. Salisbury, "Doubts about the Modern Synthetic Theory of Evolution," page. 338, American Biology Teacher (September, 1971).6. John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary, The Major Transitions in Evolution, page. 81 (W.H. Freeman, 1995).